Category Archives: LCA 09

The first talk I saw was by Arthur Sale - "Beyond Open Source" - and that was a fantastic look at open access in the research world. Grrr, slow-adapting publishers!! *shakes fist*

Then I migrated to the gaming miniconf and had a blast. Highlights of the miniconf: the game playing at the end (damnit, another 5 bazillion games I haven't played that look awesome????), Jon Manning lightning-talking about Button Squid and the discussions about legal stuff related to games and open source, everything from licenses to lawsuits, was information I'm sure will be handy in the future.

Speaking of the future, it's about to arrive. Tally ho, day 3 here we go!

Started at the kernel miniconf. The talk about parallel programming quite interesting. I went back later for the ACPI talk and even though I understood less than half, the speaker did communicate very clearly how tricky the topic was.

Went to business miniconf after, some really interesting talks and good speakers.

Fail of the day was when I went to the talk about Android at the Open Mobile miniconf. Sorry, I couldn't get through the accent at all. I'm sure the speaker was saying something intelligent, but I had no idea what.

But all this pales in comparison to the lively debate between speaker and attendees at the "Microsoft + Open Source: Did Hell Freeze Over?" talk at the end of the business miniconf. Wow. Just. WOW.

As soon as poor Lawrence mentioned "standards", all bets were off. The cross-section of the F/OSS world in that room weren't letting that one past. To everyone's credit, it didn't turn nasty. To the speakers credit, he didn't buckle under pressure, and I do feel slightly bad for him having a somewhat hostile audience.